Archive for February, 2011|Monthly archive page

Here it is, from a photo taken in 1929, a year after the Banff Springs Hotel was renovated. Heaven on earth! Image via Wikipedia

Not many people are eager for a vacation involving ice, snow and air so cold it hurts to breathe. Your breath freezes onto your scarf, leaving a shelf of rime. Your moist nostril hairs lock together and, as your body warmth condenses and freezes inside the lenses, your eyeglasses are useless.

But so worth it!

I’m in Banff, Alberta for another two days, a week in all, and it will be heart-wrenching to leave behind such spectacular beauty. I wake up every morning, in my little 8th. floor aerie, and peer out at the snow-capped peaks, painted pink with the dawn’s light or flirting through mist and snow squalls.

Why Banff? I’m Canadian, so it’s been part of my fantasies and visual vocabulary for years, although popular with Europeans as I hear British and Irish, French and Spanish and German accents all over town.

My father even made a film here, for Walt Disney, called “King of the Grizzlies.” Although I didn’t join him on location, he told me how to wrangle a grizzly — jelly doughnuts (held out to entice him forward) and low-voltage wiring (to keep him on the path.)

I’ve settled into an astonishing place, built in 1888 and renovated in 1928, The Banff Springs Hotel, and have reveled in its combination of elegance, history, luxury and warmth. Tea is taken in a room whose wall of windows faces a valley. A heated pool outdoors shoots plumes of steam into the frigid air. Stained glass windows overlook a curling rink.

The hotel is so large they hand you a map to help you locate your room, and their many amenities, from a bowling alley to the spa to the sushi restaurant to the pub in the woods. I’ve been working on a photo project involving one small, beloved white stuffed bear I’ve had forever, posing him throughout its rooms and halls; I’m calling it The Unregistered Guest.

And every day brings the distinctive clomp-clomp-clomp of skiiers trudging the hallways in their ski boots.

Why do most women — certainly educated Western women with unimpeded access to telephones, the Internet and media outlets — still remain so invisible and inaudible?

I don’t mean the images or inanities of women like Paris Hilton or the Kardashians.

Quick! Name ten well-known and highly-respected women whose opinions carry national or international weight: Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel and…the list quickly dwindles when it comes to females currently known in the media as an expert on much of anything.

Until or unless women claim the same intellectual space, jostling elbow to sharpened elbow with all the men who feel utterly confident speaking their minds, we will remain unheard, our deepest concerns unheeded.

I loved, loved, reading an op-ed this week in Canada’s national daily newspaper of record, The Globe and Mail, arguing for the retention of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan by Alaina Podmorow, a 14-year-old Canadian girl who founded a charity for Afghan woman and girls.

She did so after hearing, and being inspired, by Sally Armstrong, a fellow Canadian — albeit a few decades older — a journalist whose passion for women and world affairs lit the fuse of activism in a little girl. That’s my kind of girl power!

And how often do you read, in a national newspaper with the stature of The New York Times or the Globe, an op-ed or letter to the editor written by a woman? Let alone a young girl?

We were treated to the news last week, via the New York Times, that Wikipedia, increasingly the go-to reference for historical and contemporary general knowledge, has a dark secret. It is chiefly written by 25-year-old males.

Help us and save us.

It’s true. A study has shown that only 13 per cent of the hundreds of thousands of contributors to the “collaborative” online encyclopedia are female. Of the 87 per cent who remain, and are male, the average age is mid-twenties. Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation (a woman, oddly enough), says this came about because of Wikipedia’s nature. It is skewed toward aggressive hackertypes who are obsessed with facts and reflect the male-dominated computer culture. They are, furthermore, imbued with a sense that it is really important for everyone to know about Niko Bellic, a character who is a former soldier in the video game Grand Theft Auto IV. He gets an article five times as long as does Pat Barker, a (female) British novelist in her late 60s. That is, he did until Gardner herself added background to Pat Barker’s entry.

So this is how it works. Women have to step up and become Wikipedia contributors.

This isn’t a new problem. Sigh.

Women, still, are so often socialized from earliest childhood to be “nice”. How many of us, still, are raised with the appalling and powerful imprecation: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything.”

Women are so often told to be quiet, be nice, calm down, sit back. We need to be shouting!

Whether in print, television, radio, in blogs, letters to the editor, anywhere that makes clear we have strong opinions and they deserve serious attention. And yet, and yet, depending what sort of culture and community you live in, there are often strong imperatives, religious or political or economic or familial, that stay our hands and still our tongues.

It’s been the most exhausting and emotionally wrenching week of my life.

This morning my Mom — the woman who’s lived alone in Lima, Bath, Roswell, NM, Gibsons, B.C., Toronto — who’s been from Nauru to Oaxaca — moved into one room, in a nursing home.

The woman who covered the Chicago Eight trial as a radio reporter, who cried on my 11th birthday the morning she served me blueberry pie in bed because Bobby Kennedy had been shot. The woman whose hair color changed almost daily in the 1960s thanks to a fab collection of wigs, and the confidence to pull it (them) off.

Whose collection of mantas, moles and delicate cashmere Indian shawls, collected on her travels, inspired my lifelong love of textiles and my own collection of them.

I joined her for dinner (served at an ungodly 5:00 p.m., with several of her dining room companions asleep at their tables) and kept her company as she ate a bit of beans and corn and pork. She didn’t like the meal or even the china mug her tea was served in.

Then we sat in her room and talked for a few hours. I asked about Edgar, a folk art animal she has owned for as long as I have known her; she bought him in London when we lived there. I showed her some recent winter nature photos I had shot.

I’ve been in Victoria, B.C. for only two days, after flying from New York, where I live. I’m here, the only child, with a shared power of attorney with a friend of my mother’s, to put my mom — one of the most ferociously private and independent women I’ve ever met — into a nursing home. She is only 76.

To describe this week as painful and sad and wrenching is to understate the maelstrom of emotions threatening to engulf us both. Yet there is no time to zone out emotionally or intellectually, no matter how tempting.

Despite my own fears, sadness, jet lag, fatigue and general sense of overhelmedness, like everyone trying to be a caregiver, I must be on, present, attentive, meticulous in my attention to every detail — from the screwdriver I need to borrow (a Philips head? not sure) to detach the antique medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom to sell at auction to the 24-paragraph contract I signed today with the nursing home, the one with so many contingencies it made my head spin.

The most challenging piece of all this? Taking care of myself.

So, which is not at all typical of how I handle my life, I am telling almost everyone I meet here, from the clerk at the grocery store to the woman selling me a mid-afternoon cappuccino, why I’m here, and savoring, gratefully, the kindness I encounter. Victoria is the Florida of Canada, the one city where so many Canadian seniors choose to retire — and often end up moving into a nursing home here. So everyone, from the attorney to the auctioneer, knows the territory and how it feels for the caregiver rushed into a welter of decisions.

What to sell? What to keep?

How do I break the news, as I had to this afternoon, sitting on the bed beside her in the hospital (where she has been for 3.5 months) that my mother’s new home — one small room — simply does not have room for two chests of drawers. Just one. Which would she prefer?

It is a hideous and heartbreaking question to ask. I wish she could have stayed in the other room we found — twice its size and easily holding many more of her beloved things. But the owner of that nursing home was a really nasty piece of work and also refused to accommodate my mother’s newly-discovered celiac disease.

There is no way to make life in one small room, eating meals with 52 strangers beneath extremely bright overhead lights, especially alluring.

And then I gave her, too soon perhaps, probably the worst possible news she could have heard, beyond a terminal diagnosis. She is a woman who traveled South America alone in her 40s, lived alone in Lima and Bath and Roswell, NM after married life in London and Vancouver and Toronto….it was, that because of her damaged lungs, she will likely never be allowed to fly in an airplane again.

Her shoulders sagged and I wished more than anything I could have snatched those words back again. But I could not. I cannot.

And she lives a six-hour flight away from me, an impossible distance for her to travel by car or train or bus. Neither can either of us, for several reasons, move closer to one another.

So I despair of my inability to comfort her and turn back the clock. I feel powerless and angry and sad.

So I call my sweetie and he hugs me over the phone. I sleep a deep, restorative 9 to 10 hours every night. I have a beer or a glass of wine. I sort through my mother’s linens and books and dishes and glasses and wonder when or where someone will do this for me. I vow to return home and clear to the bare walls our garage and storage lockers full of…stuff.

Here’s a fantastic, detailed story by author Gail Sheehy about coping with her husband’s cancer from the March issue of Woman’s Day on caregiving. The issue also contains a story about how to prepare for this role, with lots of practical advice.

I love this odd, elegant phrase — de-accessioning — used by curators of museums, to describe the formal and sometimes fraught process of culling their collections in order to upgrade and acquire new pieces.

Sort of a garage sale, but with 17th. century tapestries and 19th.century portraits.

Cultural institutions like the National Academy Museum and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University have generated controversy by selling or even considering selling items to cover operating costs, a practice forbidden by the professional association for art museum directors.

So even though all of the sales — with the exception of the historical society’s — are to be used to generate funds for future acquisitions, institutions that deaccession these days find themselves on the defensive. “Part of the normal biological clock of museums is to examine their collections,” said David Franklin, the director of the Cleveland Museum, which hopes to gain about $1 million from its sale. “We should be constantly refining and upgrading. I’ve given the message to all the curators that I regard deaccessioning as a normal act, and I encourage them to reassess the collections constantly.”

I think about this because I have some nice belongings I now want to dispose of, get some cash for, and acquire something better: a Lartigue photo, a kilim rug, a Japanese silk kimono, a raccoon boa. It’s much easier to bring something into your life or your home than find the right buyer for it when you need that cash.

This week I’m in Canada, to face the not unusual but fairly horrible task of sorting through my mother’s possessions and deciding — with her help — what will be sold, donated or kept. She is moving tomorrow into a nursing home, and it’s all been pretty sudden, so we’re having to make quick yet major decisions about some valuable objects and art. Let alone books, photos and personal papers.

I’ve bought and sold at auction before, and have written enough on art and antiques that I have a good idea what’s potentially valuable and is not, but for many people — and this is only a one-bedroom apartment, not a huge house full of stuff — it’s overwhelming physically, emotionally and financially. I admit, I’m dreading it.

When we’re at our most vulnerable, blindsided by grief and haste and confusion and loss, whether of life, home, vehicle, job or all of these at once, we have to detach from all these objects and dispose of them.

However Buddhist we wish to be(c0me) through practicing non-attachment, our possessions so often define us and encapsulate our memories.

Having loved and lost and loved again — now in the 11th year with my sweetie — here’s how he won my heart, and continues to.

I suspect many of these are on your wish list as well:

Be loyal. If someone disses me, especially in front of others, remind them, however gently, that their concerns are best addressed directly to me.

Be fair. If you know I’ve been doing all the housework and you’ve been doing none, man up and grab that toilet bowl brush!

Listen carefully. Do not blow me off with “I hear you.” Focus your undivided attention on me for at least 30 minutes every day and you will learn who I am and where I’m going and whether I still want you with me on that journey.

Make me laugh. I can handle a ton o’ stress as long as I can laugh long and hard in the middle of it. A man who makes me laugh wins me every time.

Action, not words. As someone who uses words for a living, as a journalist and author, I am totally unimpressed by fair phrases and fancy promises. Heard ‘em all! I’m watching and waiting for you to put those words into action. Until you do, I tend to tune out.

Take good care of yourself. Dress with care and style, smell good, trim your hair and nails. Go to the gym or court or field and sweat off your stress and frustrations. Or meditate, or pray or go fishing to savor life and slow down into pleasure and come home again happy. Watch what you eat and remember that a trim, healthy man who respects himself enough to keep strong and flexible is attractive at any age.

Be fun. What do you do for pure fun? That does not involve some tech-toy or screen or sitting still? Think of fun, spontaneous things to do or places to go or a new meal to try. Delight me, please.

Have a spiritual life. You must be very clear that we all are much more than the sum of our possessions, good looks and/or fancy job title. What are you giving back to this world of value to others?

Astonish me. My sweetie scrubbed my mother’s soiled mattress after she had been trapped in bed for days before she was rescued with a brain tumor (She is fine.) Who does that? He did. Sold!

Don’t confuse charm or personality with character. It’s a very old-fashioned word, character, but it’s what lasts long after superficial charm or a cute smile or a cool job. After the age of 40, life starts getting much tougher for most of us, as our parents sicken and die, as friends die too young and we face our our work and health challenges. A man, or woman, with character will be steadfast through it all.

Be kind. To me, yourself, to others. Pat dogs and cats in passing (unless you’re allergic or phobic.) Hug babies and kids — everyone! Kiss people when you see them. Hold their hands, literally or figuratively, when they are scared or lonely. Compassion is one of the sexiest qualities a man can have!

I love the idea of testing out 52 jobs to find the one that might fit!

Maybe because I never doubted what I wanted to do, and knew from a very early age that I wanted to be a writer. (My dreams of being a radio disc jockey were dashed after one visit to CHUM-FM, then Toronto’s number one rock station, when I realized DJs at commercial stations don’t just play their favorite music all day.)

I grew up in a family of professional communicators — all freelance — who wrote television series, directed feature films and documentaries, wrote and edited magazine articles, so it seemed perfectly normal and logical to:

1) not have a “real” job but sit around the house and negotiate with agents and work when necessary;

2) have a ton of creative ideas all the time, knowing full well that some of them would never sell or find favor;

3) fight hard for the ideas I truly believe in and find supportive partners to pay for them, because someone will always say no — but someone will also, quite possibly say Yes!

I didn’t realize it at the time, but their behavior and experiences strongly shaped my notion of what “work” means. It includes a lot of travel, whenever possible, meeting lots of new people all the time, creating your own concepts — whether articles, films, shows or books, having the self-confidence and stamina to hang in there when times (as they certainly have) get tough. (It also means living within your means because a fantastic year can easily be followed by a leaner one and you need cash in the bank and a low overhead and no debt, all good lessons to learn.)

In 2007, I took a part-time job as a retail sales associate at a mall. Eye-opener! I was 20 to 30 years older than all my co-workers and had never had a job requiring me to stand up for five or six hours at a time, let alone deal with the public in a service role.

In it, I talk honestly about what it felt like to go from being a newspaper reporter at the U.S.’s 6th.-largest daily to wearing a plastic badge, folding T-shirts for $11/hour. I also talk to many others about what our jobs means to our identities and sense of self-worth.

What we do at work, at its best, is who we are, not just something we do to earn a living.

I recently took an amazing test designed to ferret out our work-related motivations, administered on-line. In 15 minutes, it tactfully and succinctly forces you to face your deepest values….

Why do you work? What do most want, and enjoy, from your work emotionally?

James Sale, a British executive who created this system, is offering it FREE to anyone who emails him before February 28 and says, in their subject line, “friend of Caitlin Kelly.”

And be prepared to learn a lot, some of it perhaps even a little painful. I did. I learned a great deal about myself and suspect you will too.

The test measures nine key indicators of what truly, even unconsciously, motivates us in our work, whether you are a Director (likes to be in charge), Defender (very attached to security), Creator (yup, me), Searcher (me, too), Spirit (that was me.) You might most powerfully wish to be a Friend, A Star or a Builder.

But if your current work is not allowing you to express your deepest self, it can feel like a straitjacket, no matter how much status, income or lifestyle it provides.

I’ve been facing this sudden reality for about the past two months. My divorced mother, 76, who lives in a very far away city in Canada — I am just north of New York City — now must move into a nursing home. I have someone there sharing power of attorney with me, but even so it has become an unpaid, draining, overwhelming, full-time job demanding almost daily decisions, all of them with major consequences.

None of which are anything I have ever faced before or have a frame of reference for.

I’m the only child.

If you have not yet entered this specific obstacle course, a few things you need to think about:

Does your parent have a will? Do you know where it is and who is the executor?

Have they, in advance, designated a power of attorney?

Do they, or you, have a written inventory of all their belongings and which they might want to keep when they have to trade a home for one room?

What do they want to do with all ephemera — photos, letters, documents? Have you or they sorted through it and identified what is important or of sentimental value? Identified who’s who in the photos?

Who will handle your parent’s affairs financially?

Do they have long-term care insurance? (Do you?)

Have you discussed any of this with your parent?

Do you have anyone, like a geriatric care manager, to help you if you are trying to deal with all of this from a distance?

Here’s what we’ve faced:

She fell in the hospital, breaking her hip in the emergency room

Surgery to repair her hip and months of rehab and physical therapy to regain strength and mobility

Another fall in the hospital, which protested there was no way they could prevent yet another one

Bowel surgery and a colostomy

She has COPD and heart problems as a result

She has early, for now, mild dementia and trouble with short-term memory

The learning curve is vertical!

These are just some of the many people I’ve spoken to in the past three months:

Two nurses, doctors (at least four, so far), physical therapist, occupational therapist, nursing home staff at four homes while seeking a suitable and available bed, hospital social worker, hospital risk manager, attorney, realtor, notary for the buyers for her apartment; auction house coming to appraise and sell her things; Salvation army for picking up the rest, movers to move her into the nursing home, airline (for my flight); car rental (for my visit), UPS (for packing and shipping back here whatever I can take or keep), bank staff to try and arrange handling of her finances…

The only thing keeping me sane is knowing many other women also going through this hell or who have already gone through it, and who kindly offer compassion, humor and advice.

It is a maelstrom of grief, fear, sadness, confusion, anger, frustration, loss. And the cost is staggering — $6,000 a month for one room. Yes, a nursing home room is definitely much cheaper elsewhere, but she is not physically able to move and emotionally would not want to as her friends are in this city.

The last time I enjoyed being in a post office — sort of like enjoying being at the dentist, these days — was in the small, funky town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico with a woman who owns a house there on a ranch outside of town. When we dropped in to pick up her mail from one of the tiny gilded post office boxes, (and they really are boxes, one forgets), we had a great chat with the lively woman working at the counter. We admired the WPA murals and went for lunch.

Now that the U.S. Postal service is about to shut down thousands of post offices, many of them in small towns and rural areas like T or C….does it matter?

I think it does, as Walter Kirn wrote recently in The New York Times magazine:

The painful truth, of course, is that the post offices most likely to vanish also happen to function as the centers of the communities in which they’re situated. Social-networking sites aren’t just Internet phenomena. In Livingston, Mont., my current hometown, the post office does what Facebook only purports to as far as promoting human interaction. On the wide granite steps of the neo-Classical edifice that stands as one of our few local reminders that we 7,000 people of the Great Plains belong to a civilized modern nation, my neighbors and I trade news, contract for services and generally mix and mingle in a manner that permits us to feel like neighbors rather than strangers subject to the same weather. For people who live far out in the countryside or who are too old and frail to get around much, this can be a life-sustaining service, particularly in the winter months. The chance to chat improves folks’ mental health, and the failure of an old man to fetch his power bill for several days alerts others to go check on him.

I like the physicality of letters and packages, wrangling tape and cardboard and wielding a Sharpie pen for the address. I like the idea of a post office as one of the few services we all use, whether rich or poor, whatever our political views. In an increasingly divided country, it’s one of the few glues left.

As I prepare to launch my new book, I’ve sent a dozen of them out to reviewers in those little padded envelopes, lining up each time with a little bit of hope. With a mother living in another country, I’ve become adept over the years at minimizing the cost of the real contents I mail to her, and at finding gifts that won’t shatter or spill en route.

I have many great memories of post office visits while traveling — in Antibes, Florence, Paris, Venice, Sydney — but, sorry to say, very few as nice as that T or C encounter.

For me now, living in a small town north of Manhattan, my post office in recent years has beome a true circle of hell — dirty, understaffed and with clerks who seem to take a special delight in being rude because they know no one will discipline or fire them.

I’ve started to avoid the post office whenever possible, and that makes me sad and angry. I used to enjoy it.

It was once called reporting, the idea of spending days, weeks or maybe even months researching a story in depth. It didn’t mean a quick Google search and a few emails.

It always involved the acronym GOYA — Get Off Your Ass! — as in, yes you actually have to leave the newsroom and the building.

But today such a story — like this recent, excellent one in Fortune about the collapse of the Deepwater Horizon — is called a “deep dive”.

Having been a print journalist for a few decades, one of the things I enjoy is our own little lexicon, the shorthand many of us use as we roam from newspaper to magazine to television to radio to blogging. Just as doctors have their words (GOMER = Get Out Of My Emergency Room), we too have a vocabulary of our own.

My sweetie, a career photographer and now a photo editor for The New York Times, speaks this language as well. We can have conversations that might be pretty unintelligible to a non-journo!

For your amusement:

Lede The opening paragraph of a story

Kicker The final paragraph of a story

Nut Graf The central argument for why this story matters

TickTock A recounting of how a major story unfolded

Deck In magazines, the short abstract that tells you what the piece will be about

Hed The headline

Coverlines The teasers that are meant to make you pick up a magazine: “Ten Days To Thinner Thighs!”

Masthead The listing of the publication’s senior staff; sometimes all of them

Above the fold Where the most important stories land in a newspaper, above where it’s folded in half in a broadsheet

Broadsheet A newspaper that unfolds, like The New York Times

Tabloid A smaller paper like the New York Post; tabs are usually more downmarket in tone and content than broadhseets

Berliner A paper whose dimensions lie between a broadsheet and tabloid, like Le Monde

The wood The entire front page of a tabloid, given to the biggest stories

Agate The tiny credit at the edge of a photograph naming the photographer and/or agency

The budget The daily list of every story planned for the day’s paper, which may change as the news does, delineating how much space each will get

Dress page The front page of a section

Byline The reporter’s name…i.e. By….

Dateline The location from which the story was filed (confusing, no?)

Curtain-raiser A story that leads into an event and previews it

Puff piece An uncritical story

Hatchet job The opposite of a puff piece!

TK Short for “to come” — I don’t have that information yet but will fill it in later

Phoner A phone interview

Presser A press conference

Flack A public relations representative

Hack/Hackette In the U.K., a journalist, male or female

Sub-editor In the U.K., a copy editor who fixes errors and grammar after the story is written by the reporter

Bulldog The earliest edition of a daily paper, which may have five editions a day

Slug What a story is named, in one word or two, as it moves through the news system

Heave A story that goes on and on and on and on…

Thumbsucker Often, a Time cover story, like “Does God Exist”

FOB In magazines, the front of the book, where smaller items run

The well In magazines, the main part of the publication, where longer features run

I’m the broad behind Broadside, Caitlin Kelly, a career journalist. photo: Jose R. Lopez You’re one of 13,3430 followers, from Thailand to Toronto, Berlin to Melbourne. A National Magazine Award winner, I’m a former reporter and feature writer at The Globe and Mail, Montreal ... Continue reading →